The Ides of Perry Mason 69

Note: In the Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the month's counting period. In a hat tip to those tough old Romans (may their example inspire our endurance), on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, I will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's contributions to the mystery genre (Perry Mason is mostly Late Stoic). Fact is, so many articles are in the can, I figure why not release more often? Saving them doesn't earn interest and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

The Case of the Crying Swallow - Erle Stanley Gardner

Collected in 1971 after the author’s death in 1970, the centerpiece is a Perry Mason novelette but it also  presents three short stories. All the tales involve stolen jewelry. 

In The Case of the Crying Swallow, a distraught husband seeks lawyer Perry Mason’s assistance in locating his missing wife. The search uncovers rummy characters up to no good, blackmail, and murder. Mason uncovers clues with his sidekicks Della Street and Paul Drake. Interesting is Gardner using a different length for a Mason story, but this experiment is just OK.

Gardner learned to write in the 1920s and 1930s by churning out hundreds of novellas and short stories for weekly magazines.  The Candy Kid was published on March 14, 1931 in Detective Fiction Weekly. It stars Lester Leith, who played a gentleman crook, a stock character in those bygone days, such a remote time that there actually existed a market of working-class males that read genre fiction.  It’s a comic story, in fact, that narrates Leith's scheme to recover stolen rubies. Like one of Gardner’s other pulp series heroes Ed Jenkins, Phantom Crook, Leith pulls cons on other crooks and donates the proceeds to charity, after he deducts expenses to support his opulent lifestyle.

Sidney Zoom was another independently wealthy advocate for the underdog. With the assistance of his police dog Rip, he aids the police to enmesh crooks in his web of deceit in a good cause. The story The Vanishing Corpse first appeared on August 15, 1931 in Detective Fiction Weekly. A murder occurs and then the corpus vanishes.

Lest the gritty settings of the worst years of the Depression get us down, the final story is in 1949, as post-war prosperity was starting to rock and roll. The Affair of the Reluctant Witness features Jerry Bane and his assistant with the prodigious memory, ex-copper Mugs Magoo (got to work in an alliteration somewhere). Jerry is a trust-fund kid, with the spendthrift account managed by a stingy family lawyer that is prone to lecture him about the virtues of penny-pinching and hard work. This doesn’t sit well with Jerry. With two years of malnutrition and abuse in a Japanese POW camp under his belt, he feels entitled to a little fun. The story is pretty straightforward: Jerry constructs a counter-con to undermine a real con by a real bad guy.

A snappy collection of short stories. All the stories were interesting. A fast tempo, concise narrative, tight mystery makes this book a light and frothy read.